The Wound Makes the Medicine: Elemental Remediations for Transforming Heartache

By Pixie Lighthorse

A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Row House Publishing
• Release date: Dec 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781955905442

Pixie Lighthorse

Cherie Dawn Carr is the author of seven books centered on healing through intimate relationships with the natural world and a tribal member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes as Lighthorse to honor the unheard voices of her ancestors, who were forcibly removed from our homelands via the first of many Trails of Tears. Lighthorse currently resides in the Pacific Northwest.

Book preview

PROUD FLESH

Scars form

sinuous and silky

tenacious tissue

to cover and protect

the torn

TENDING SCAR TISSUE

DEAR HEART, YOUR PROUD FLESH is scar tissue that grew over your wounds—more than what was needed to heal properly. It formed thick and substantial on the surface over the energy of your capacity to love and be loved, an overprotective armor that cannot yet trust the air to heal it. It protrudes—raised, uneven, and excessive.

It is understandable that defensive armor results from trust and love disappearing without your consent, taken from you without your control or desire to release it—and yet, exposure to your awareness is what it needs to reawaken to the flow of your blood. Proud flesh doesn’t want to have needs. It is a trauma response that choked out the possibility for you to be loved the way you yearned to be loved.

Heartache is the midwife that can birth you into new levels of healing… with your permission. The cost of staying hidden beneath thick scars impacts all of your relationships, the work you choose to do in the world, how roughly or gently you nurture children, the voice you use to discipline yourself to keep on living.

The proliferation of tissue that overgrows your wounds is tough by design, and it must be broken down with care, exposed to sunlight and warmth, tenderized gently but consistently to be integrated back into the body. In your armored state, you must find all the ways to consent to be vulnerable to light and air. Being outside where the sun can fall on your face and warm your bones—while you acknowledge where in your body the hurt is crying silently—is a simple act of dissolution that nature provides. Speaking to a trusted friend, drawing your loved ones close, and learning who can witness you in your fluid and ever-changing moods without judgment can prepare your system for transformation.

Healing your deepest cuts requires your determination to permit the healing to take place within you; to replace your fear with a stronger desire to risk loving and being loved, which includes being injured by love again and again; to be intimate with your body and your life as they are right now, which requires giving up the ghosts that have taken up residence here.

Energetically, proud flesh holds fast, stopping your breath before it can reach all areas of your body. It is my consistent experience that my breath will come up from my diaphragm and catch right where I hold my fear—just at my sternum, midway between my navel and my heart. During my periods of freezing up and fighting my cycle of inner healing, I needed to challenge that catch. I envisioned it as a small pair of jaws that clamped my windpipe each time my body sought breath.

I want all of my breath, in all the places my body needs it. I want you to want yours, too. It is our birthright to breathe completely. Part of the sacred task of transformation is challenging ourselves to return to profound love, which will gradually soften the scar tissue that armors us.

I am called to expose the battered fragments of my heart to light and air, trusting that nature knows best how to move me forward.

STAYING WITH THE ACHE

IT IS POSSIBLE TO RELEASE control, surrender, and be open to an outcome different from the one you had hoped for. Don’t try to go at a pace faster than what you can handle. Simplify. Put your big plans on hold.

You cannot make many plans apart from simply being with the ache. The ache will tell you everything you need to know, while fear will try to talk loudly over it. Fear often says that if you stay present with your pain, you will get stuck in it. Fear says that once you open the floodgates, you may not be able to stop the pain from surging through.

Why are we afraid that if we allow ourselves to feel the depth of our pain, we will get sucked into a lifelong depression? I believe that some states deemed by the overculture to be negative and unwanted come from a denial of what hurts. How will denying our hurt move the needle forward?

You must allow yourself to feel your heartache, so that you can be reclaimed by the healing that comes after the worst has been fully felt. Underneath the pain of today’s loss is yesterday’s untended hurt, hopelessness, and disappointment… asking to be acknowledged, to be fully felt.

If emotional pain were a soft-tissue injury, the ligaments around the injury site would need gentle lengthening, so the tissue could breathe and become fluffy and pink again. Toughened scar tissue was not given a chance to be rehabilitated at the time of injury. It now requires extra care, patience, and slow movement so circulation can flow again.

I will work gently and slowly with the old pain awakened by today’s pain, to soothe the original injuries that caused me to hurt so much.

BEING PRESENT AND SETTING BOUNDARIES

YOUR HEALING PROCESS WILL NOT stand for controlling or rigid agendas. It does not call for bullying from the parts of the self that want to hurry the process along, or anxious attempts to accept the hurt and be done already. It will not stand for being filed away, but rather will petition patiently through inconsistent sensations and ever-changing emotions, and the natural ebb and flow of noticing, which will sometimes entail confusion or agony. It needs your devoted attention.

These moments of confusion and agony may feel never-ending, but they will wane with love and proper care. You might unconsciously suspend loving yourself if it seems too hard under the circumstances. Perhaps you’re working through guilt or old shame… but it’s still possible to love and honor yourself, as well as the slow process of healing.

I encourage you to set boundaries for what you do and do not have energy for. I find that interacting with people when I am really hurting is challenging, so I set limits on my interactions, as well as what I bring to and seek from them. It is important to maintain an inward focus in times of pain. We do not think of heartbreak as a listening time, as a prompt to surrender deeply to what is flowing through us. We are accustomed to collapsing, or tucking things away to deal with later, or giving all our time to people and situations outside ourselves.

In this medicine-making stage, we must look into our hurts and be present to them. There is a desperation that comes with unjust loss and a very physical sensation that can feel overwhelming at times. Your body and soul have had to withstand a lot to get to this place of tending torn heartspace. May your wholeness be fed with consistency of care, and cradled by the process itself, as well as by your willingness to be deeply present with it.

I will allow myself to surrender to the hurt and set limits and boundaries around my resources so that I can stay with the process.

TAKING BACK OUR PROJECTIONS

YOUR PROUD FLESH WILL INEVITABLY bump up against the proud flesh of others. What I mean by this is that the feelings you cannot tolerate will show up as projections you wish others to hold for you. A projection is nothing more than a defense mechanism that you subconsciously use to cope with painful feelings. We seek to target others to get out of working with the pain they triggered. For example, perhaps you are experiencing rage that doesn’t seem safe to feel—maybe you end up perceiving your partner or another loved one as being wrathful and angry all the time, and you accuse this person of torpedoing your life with hot temper. There may be a grain of truth to your perception… but there may also be an aspect of you that doesn’t want to claim its own part in the dynamic. Likewise, as you go through your own process of healing, you might face other people’s projections; they might tell you to get over it or suggest that you’re too intense, because some unhealed part of them is too intense, hasn’t moved through their pain, and requires their attention, care, and